John Dryden Quotes

Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw.

I've never liked the moment of seeing something beautiful - a sunset, a moose, an elephant - and then raising a camera and trying to capture it for some future moment. That's always struck me as strange.

When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted.

To one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.

Beauty is one in the universe, and, whatever form it assumes, it always arouses a religious feeling in the hearts of mankind.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, or of heart.

Perhaps it is a human thing, to look upon such beauty and fail to encompass it.

Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

Every realm of nature is marvelous.

We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough of nature.

I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate.

I knew it was beautiful, but knowing something is beautiful and caring about it are two very different things, and I didn't care.

Mother of Marvels, mysterious and tender Nature, why do we not live more in thee.

Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don't misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their existence.

It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.

I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.

The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

There is a paradise of form and colors in the world. And because you have eyes still in good condition, you can get in touch with the paradise. So when I become aware of my eyes, I touch one of the conditions of happiness. And when I touch it, happiness comes.

It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

The other day, when my 4-year-old saw a flowering tree and said, "Daddy, it's raining petals," that was poetry that just melted my heart into a mushy, yummy Fudgsicle.